"The word Diener is German for servant. In English, it is generally used to describe the person, in the morgue, responsible for handling, moving, and cleaning the corpse (though, at some institutions dieners perform the entire dissection at autopsy). It is derived from the German word Leichendiener, which literally means corpse servant."—Wikipedia

Hi Pro, no, absolutely not--I'm sorry I haven't been more responsive. A series of the issues you reported fell into the bermuda triangle zone where they weren't absolute showstoppers, nor were they two minute fixes, so I made a mental note to get to them and have been slow about it.

Though coincidentally, I'm moving some new stuff into production later tonight, including fixes for a handful of the things you've mentioned recently. The mislabeled link when comments appear on word pages is fixed, and most embedded video should start working again too--we upgraded some internal components, and the new versions had stricter embedding policies, which I've adjusted.

“In the continuing controversy surrounding the president's U.S. citizenship, a new fringe group informally known as "Afterbirthers" demanded Monday the authentication of Barack Obama's placenta from his time inside his mother's womb. ”

“Before joining The Times, Mr. Shortz was the editor of Games magazine. He holds the world's only college degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles, which he earned in the Individualized Major Program at Indiana University in 1974.”

Monobina Gupta, who has researched domestic violence for Jagori, a nongovernmental organization, draws a direct link between these killings and the abortion of female fetuses: “The dowry is part of the continuum of gender-based discrimination and violence, beginning with female feticide.”

“Last June, Urban Treatment Associates in Camden hired Mr. Devoureau as a part-time urine monitor; his job was to make sure that people recovering from addiction did not substitute someone else’s urine for their own during regular drug testing.”

“Rarely does a minute go by without a customer stopping just long enough to pass a dollar bill to Lonnie Loosie, known to the police by his given name, Lonnie Warner, 50. They clench the two “loosies” — as single cigarettes are called — that he thrusts back in return.”

I've been noodling with the homepage tagline pretty regularly, so I'm not exactly sure what "bring back the old one" means. But clearly the current one ain't working, so I just flipped it back to the previous version.

“Or, as in a 2009 Wisconsin case of “sextortion,” a boy, pretending to be a girl online, who solicited explicit pictures of boys, which he then used as blackmail to compel those boys to have sex with him.”

“For centuries, each building, called a tulou in Mandarin Chinese, would house an entire clan, virtually a village. Everyone living inside would have the same surname, except for those who had married into the clan. The tulou usually tower four floors and have up to hundreds of rooms that open out onto a vast central courtyard, like the Colosseum.”

“Mr. Perkins, who dropped out of school after the third grade, taught himself the rudiments of blues guitar on a homemade instrument called a diddley bow: a length of wire stretched between nails driven into a wall.”

“Japanese officials subsequently said that the explosion had damaged a doughnut-shaped steel container of water, known as a torus, that surrounds the base of the reactor vessel inside the primary containment building.”

“Tokyo Electric Power said Tuesday that after the explosion at the No. 2 reactor, pressure had dropped in the “suppression pool” — a section at the bottom of the reactor that converts steam to water and is part of the critical function of keeping the nuclear fuel protected.”

“That remedy involves pumping in seawater to cool the fuel rods, then opening vents to release the resulting steam pressure that builds in the container vessel. When the vessel is depressurized, workers can inject more seawater, a process known as “feed and bleed.”

I can't replicate that right-click issue you reported. Are you seeing it just on the homepage, or across the site? And what kind of browser are you using? Does it happen for you with all browsers, or just one?

Hi Quinn--saw your comment on feedback. Happy to help, but could you give me some more details? By suggestion, do you mean a word you added to a list, or a comment? I was just able to add and delete both, including adding and removing multi-word phrases from lists, which had been causing problems earlier.

We'll post more about WotD options soon, but if you've created your own Word of the Day (which you can do from your profile), there's now an option to invite people to subscribe to it. Go to your WotD page (once you've created one it's linked from your profile) and you'll see an 'Invite people to subscribe' link.

A kind of boat: “More than one captain made up his mind then and there that his 'cobble' or his 'mule', as they term the different classes of boats, would remain in the harbour till the storm had passed.”

Hi rz and pro, those bugs should now be fixed--list pagination now starts and one and doesn't go negative, and multi-word phrases (those were the problematic ones) can once again be deleted from lists. Thanks for your patience.

Hi H, thanks for your comment about the zeitgeist/community rename. I too was fond of the "Watch Your Language" subtitle, though it revealed an issue with the term 'Zeitgeist' as we used it. Zeitgeist implies the overall spirit of a thing, I think, and would have been more suitable for a page that was strictly about site trends. Our zeitgeist/community page is focused on a smaller subset of that--what people are saying. So while the major motivation for the change was as you suggested--'community' is less cryptic and confusing for new users--I think it's also more accurate. Though we might try to work that subtitle back in, or better yet create a "trends" page and attach it to that.

It's also worth mentioning that I flat-out stole the notion of a 'Zeitgeist' page from my old employer, LibraryThing. I'm generally an unrepentant thief, but I figured, now Tim can have it to himself again :-)

“Such passages are widespread enough in the pages of American periodicals that at least one longtime film publicist, Jeremy Walker, has coined a term of art for them: the documented instance of public eating, or DIPE.”

This one feels a little too close to home (though I think the vector for this disease is now probably facebook and twitter):

“In discussing one of them, he cites the work of Dr. John Ratey, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who believes people can be physically addicted to e-mail. “Each e-mail you open gives you a little hit of dopamine,” Mr. Chorost writes, “which you associate with satiety. But it’s just a little hit. The effect wears off quickly, leaving you wanting another hit.”

“I haven’t really had a lot of mentors. I’ve had to sort of figure things out for myself, because I’ve had a lot of whatever the opposite of a mentor is. I’ve learned a lot from seeing what didn’t work. There should be a word for that kind of boss — “dismentor” or something.”

“In doing so, they conjure up ghosts — frightening-looking ones, who owe a visual debt to Ms. de Beer’s long fascination with horror films and, lately, to the particularly bloody 1970s Italian subgenre known as giallo.”

“Sharktopus,” the blood-soaked tale of a hybrid shark-octopus developed as a secret military weapon, was one of Syfy’s biggest hits last year. (The monster goes haywire and terrorizes bikini-clad women along Mexican Riviera beaches; 2.5 million people tuned in.)

“And then last fall, not long before her 15th birthday, Daphne found herself in an actual home, reunited with the other orphans stranded after the disaster they all call “goudou-goudou” for the terrible sound of the ground shaking.”

“This superb male group, known as the Trocks, appeared in all of its mallerina glory — that is, man plus ballerina — on Friday in a program of repertory works that included “Les Lac des Cygnes” (“Swan Lake,” Act II), as well as the New York premieres, both staged by Elena Kunikova, of the pas d’action from “Harlequinade” (1997) and “Valpurgeyeva Noch” (or “Walpurgisnacht”) from 2009.”

“I want to be perfectly clear about something before moving along to answer this question: Peter Luger is not a casual restaurant. It is true that you can go there for dinner and see people dining in Giants jerseys and mom jeans, as if the dining room were an airport gate filled with Americans waiting for a delayed flight to Las Vegas. But these people are to be derided and have done much to drag the restaurant down. Peter Luger at its best is a meat church, a restaurant to attend in suit and tie or cocktail wear, the sort of place where maybe you can’t get a reservation on the phone, but where you can always get a table with the help of a firm handshake and perhaps some understanding at the door. Children shouldn’t be in there until they’re 10, at least.”

“One Sunday afternoon, they let me park myself on the couch while people played slot machines — yes, the tenants had purchased two actual casino slot machines — and bolitos, the Dominican numbers lottery.”

“We paying respect to the dead right now,” Juelz Santana told the Hammerstein Ballroom crowd Friday night, urging a moment of silence for the friends he had lost in recent months. “We gotta get this right.”

“While Mr. Obama was elected on a promise of diplomatic engagement, his strategy toward the North for the past two years, called “strategic patience,” has been to demonstrate that Washington would not engage until the North ceased provocations and demonstrated that it was living up to past commitments to dismantle, and ultimately give up, its nuclear capacity.”

“Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish uses the word Yinglish and Ameridish to describe new words, or new meanings of existing Yiddish words, created by English-speaking persons with some knowledge of Yiddish.”—Wikipedia: Yinglish

Not entirely sure I agree. Judging by the name of the account there's commercial intent, but my main litmus test is the presence of external links in inappropriate places, of which there are none--just in the profile 'website' field, which is kosher.

“While dance fans eagerly await the release next month of “Black Swan,” Darren Aronofsky’s melodrama about rival ballerinas, here’s a version of “Swan Lake” you won’t see often. It’s not new, but it has lately been making the rounds, wowing some balletomanes and horrifying others.”

“Prosecutors are said to be wary of the outlandish descriptions of sexual activities that Ruby said took place during what she called “bunga-bunga” parties, a term that has now spawned several You Tube spoofs by popular Italian comedians. Ruby has also said she received money and presents from the prime minister.”

Hi Hernandez. Digging your words and quotation, but a quick suggestion. If you want, you can create lists of words (there's an orange link to do so at the top right of your profile). Then you can add the words to the list, and comments to the words in the list. One other thing to note is that Wordnik is case sensitive, so 'Riveted' is considered a different word than 'riveted.' People general list the lowercase version unless it's a proper noun.

If you have any questions or suggestions about the site, please let me know (john@wordnik.com). Welcome, and enjoy!

“Unlike the psychedelic painter Alex Grey, whose art conveys a true believer’s faith in the reality of an ultimately beneficent divinity accessible by means of “entheogens” — drugs that activate inner gods — and practices like meditation and chanting, Mr. Tomaselli teeters on the agnostic line between belief and skepticism.”

Hi Frank. Just wanted to let you know that Wordnik is case sensitive. While you are absolutely welcome to leave any kind of comment you like on any word, the definitions you're leaving on capitalized words, like Tomtit, are already available on the lowercase versions, like tomtit.

Pro, rz, fbharjo, the number shown for the comment count is fixed (the comments were all there but it had been confusing the tag and comment counts). Pro, we'll add those sites to the also-ons this week (as well as github, foursquare, and a few others), and I'll make sure the words-listed count is inclusive.

PU, made a change that might have fixed your missing button -- can you email me whether or not the issue persists?

update: C_B, if you can read this, it means the problem with editing comments on profiles is fixed :-)

Wow ruzuzu, that was fast -- you noticed the new profile features about 3 minutes after I pushed them :-)

Quick overview: everyone's lists now show a synopsis of all the contributions they've made under their name, much the way they used to. The faux-dating fields are gone from profiles, replaced by an open field for a website, and 'also-on' fields for other social services you may want to link to. 'Recent lookups' now optionally appear on profiles, in the column with other activity like favoriting, etc.

Recent lookups is on by default, but can be hidden entirely -- click 'edit preferences' on your profile page. We can easily make it possible to have lookups visible to you, but nobody else. I didn't include that in this iteration because I didn't want to make it more complex than necessary, but we'll certainly consider it if folks would like that.

Hm, just noticed that there's a problem with the display of comments on lists. Working on the right now. Please let me know (here on by email) if you see any other problems.

“The composer Ben Neill, for example, plays what he calls the mutantrumpet — a trumpet with three bells (instead of one), six valves (instead of three), a trombone slide and an electronic interface that can turn it into a synthesizer controller.”

“The novelists Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner began complaining on Twitter last week that the Times only liked books by "white men from Brooklyn," starting the hashtag on Twitter #Franzenfreude, by means of which people could recommend good and, one supposes, comparatively obscure novels by women.”

“You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie.”

“So yes, we, too, are disappointed not to have seen crazy mean-spirited adults lobbing spittle at each other or smashing Obama pinatas with large sticks and pocket knives. (Who knows what's happening at the after parties now, though!) This rally was America-porn for the elderly in lawn chairs. And it was great, great advertising for Fox News' Glenn Beck show.”

Pro, PU, my apologies for the the embarrassingly long wait, but you've finally been upcased. You may need to log out and back in to see it reflected everywhere. Please let me know if anything's wonky, and thank you for your patience.

“On Tuesday, the British government announced that it would introduce legislation in the fall banning private companies from clamping — the British term for what Americans know as “booting” — or towing any vehicle parked on private land, and limiting the companies to a regulated system of parking tickets.”

“In the Cape Cod town of Wellfleet, Mass., the ancient rite of shellfish gathering (witness the antiquated shell middens found on coasts across the globe) is open to anyone who can plunk down $75 for a seasonal non-residential shell license.”

“Dr. Haas collaborated with BlackGold Biofuels, a small Philadelphia company that has developed a process for making biodiesel fuel out of a wide range of nonedible, low-value “fog” — the industry shorthand for fats, oils and grease.”

“When the well is static, it’s killed,” said Greg McCormack, program director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, Austin. “But if you remove the pressure, it can become unkilled. Once you put cement in it from the bottom, then it can never be unkilled.”

Hi c_b. There is a Google-powered 'search-most-of-wordnik' feature, which is kind of hidden right now, since we hope to improve upon it in the future. But at the bottom of every page, the far-right footer link is 'search'.

“Their work is based on claims among some Bolivarianólogos, as specialists here on the history of Bolívar are called, that a long-lost letter by Bolívar reveals how he was betrayed by Colombia’s aristocracy.”